I am founding Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather’s Global Strategy & Innovation Practice, and I have been with Ogilvy since April 23, 1996.
The Global Strategy & Innovation Practice is a new unit specifically created to offer clients multidisciplinary strategic services that combine creativity with rigorous effectiveness. It’s taken about 15 years but digital convergence is now actually here, and will mean change of geometric proportion to our industry. It’s a dream job to be leading Ogilvy forward globally as technology opens up an entirely new kind of creativity for our clients’ brands.
Digital is the most relevant topic in all of advertising and marketing today because every kind of advertising has “gone digital”. Ogilvy’s digital offerings range from strategy to creative to technology to media – focused on realizing the magic of digital and its ability to let people actually experience brands in new ways. From luxury brands to service brands to consumer goods to B2B brands, the biggest changes in our industry have come from innovation around the Internet. As bandwidth, speed and access continue to grow, we’ll continue to see digital acceleration as more and more marketers look at digital as an essential aspect of their marketing mix and their brand growth.
My favorite career highlight at Ogilvy is the privilege of being founder of Verge, the Ogilvy Digital Summit Series, in 2004 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since then, we have held several more of these global conferences: in San Francisco at the SF Museum of Modern Art, and at the Jazz at Lincoln Center. Soon we’ll be hosting them at our brand new Ogilvy Theater. These events showcased some of the most important contributors to innovation in the Internet's brief history, which helped educate our clients about the huge changes in consumer behavior and set a vision for the constant change characteristic of the digital age.
I have so many favorite David Ogilvy quotes. But as I think about the key to our business, it more than ever comes back to talent. So my favorite D.O. quote is: “If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants”.